The Thai Bankers' Association (TBA) has instructed commercial banks to set up an alert system to notify other banks' customers in the event of a digital banking system crash.
The move, considered a measure to alleviate problems, comes as several banks' mobile apps continue to suffer glitches, particularly on the final business day of the month when money transfer transactions surge considerably from other days as paychecks become available for withdrawal.
This is the TBA's latest measure to avert outages of several banks' digital banking systems at the same time, said Predee Daochai, chairman of the TBA and president of Kasikornbank (KBank).
With the alert system, banks that are suffering glitches must notify the TBA's central system and other banks' customers to warn about sending money to recipients who have accounts at the troubled bank, Mr Predee said.
"The system will send notifications to customers' mobile phones to warn them that the money in their account is at risk of being taken out if they continue to make transactions during the system failure," he said. "When customers see the notification, they can halt making transactions until the system is operating again. We believe that customers can get a lot of benefits [from the alert system]."
Users of the national e-payment system, PromptPay, were left frustrated when computer glitches related to formatting the calendar for 2018 held their cash hostage for about eight hours on Dec 31, 2017.
Banks' electronic money transfers, withdrawals and payment services crashed again for several hours on Aug 31, 2018. The system outage started with KBank because of human error on the internal network, disrupting other banks' systems.
The crashes compelled the banks and National Interbank Transaction Management and Exchange Co to double mobile banking transaction capacity during the peak period in a bid to prevent similar outages.
Mr Predee said KBank has been using the alert system since the second quarter of this year.
"All banks are keen on taking care of the digital system," he said. "What we do together and have agreed on is that we will alert customers of other banks whose systems are functional."
He acknowledged that it will take time to make the alert system work at full scale.
Bangkok Bank president Chartsiri Sophonpanich said his bank is in the process of setting up an alert system to comply with the TBA agreement.
"The system is expected to be available soon," he said. "The system will help customers better understand the digital banking situation and not blame the overall banking system. This could reduce user confusion in the future."